Never has the world situation been more ominous. Japan, in the hands of a military Junta, is overruning China... Germany is rearming at a rate unpara… - Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell

Why is it that we have nothing to compare with these great technological universities in this country? The main reason, I fear, is because we suffer from a most lamentable type of intellectual snobbery which causes the majority of our so-called educated people to look down on science and technology as some form of menial intellectual activity, on which civilised, cultured people need not embark and indeed are better without. I am not sure that traces of it have not survived even to this day in this House. I well remember—admittedly it was a good many years ago—mentioning to a Member of your Lordships' House a relative of his, the great Lord Rayleigh, certainly one of the six greatest physicists in the world. His comment was: "Oh, yes, he is a little odd, isn't he?—interested in chemistry and that sort of thing." That was what he said of one of the greatest physicists this country has known. It is to that attitude of mind, which has by no means died out, that many of our troubles are due.

Nobody, I imagine, will deny that the whole future of our country depends upon our being able to increase productivity in manufacture, transportation and, generally, industry in all its various branches... If our output per man-year were to be increased by only 10 per cent. most of our economic difficulties would vanish into thin air. There are only two ways of achieving this: either our people must work harder or longer hours, or we must invent new and more efficient methods of carrying out technical processes. Our prosperity, our living standards, our very survival are governed by the one brute fact that unless we can persuade foreign countries to take our exports, they will cease to send us the food on which we live and the raw materials from which our exports are made. And these exports will have to run in increasing measure the gauntlet of competition by the hard-working, highly-competent, industrialised American, Continental and Japanese manufacturers, offering their goods on favourable terms, with every refinement of selling technique, to our former customers.

[O]ur whole future depends upon our productivity: that is, the amount of useful and valuable output which can be turned out with a given amount of labour and raw materials. To improve this is far and away the most important problem confronting this country—apart, of course, from the need to preserve peace. Unless we succeed in doing it, in a generation our standard of living will sink to that of the people of Portugal and will harm not only Great Britain but the sterling area as a whole.